Brave Search API now accepts agentic payments through the x402 protocol

Brave says its Search API can now be paid per request with the open x402 protocol, so an agent can query it without an account, plan or API key.

• A request sent without payment gets an HTTP 402 Payment Required response with the price and payment details. The agent signs a USDC payment, retries the request with it attached, and gets results with a receipt for the transaction on the Base blockchain.
• Brave says it runs its own facilitator that accepts USDC on Base, with other networks and stablecoins to follow. Gas fees on Base are covered for a limited time.
• Pricing follows Brave's published API rates: $0.005 per request ($5 per 1,000) for LLM Context, its endpoint for grounding agents, and for the web, news, image, video and local endpoints.
• Brave suggests Purl Wallet, a command-line wallet developed by Stripe, as the easiest way for an agent to pay.